tableOS — Join the Waitlist!
Make meaning out of the Internet
The Internet is full of inspiration and wisdom, but it’s also noisy and frustrating.
Powerful tools like Google, YouTube, Medium, Quora, and Reddit let us search through the Internet in mere seconds—very convenient—but since they often prioritize sales (or traffic, popularity), the results returned from these tools tend to lack “insights” that resonate deeply with our minds.
Often, the encounters that give us the eureka moment or make us excited are not from those generic search results, but during a random walk to a less known place, where we meet an author who writes with a weaker intention of becoming famous or an artist who creates for fun.
Yet the encounters are ephemeral. In the blink of an eye, we’re pulled back to the noisy and frustrating streets. Even if we bookmark it or make a record in our note-taking apps, we may never find it due to limited search capability, and never want to review it because the view in note-taking apps is so narrow and boring—mostly one item at a time.
We’re tempted to go out, to go online, to run on the highway of information and get lost in the “engaging content”. Hold on, can we build a better personal place? Build a personal tool that you can
Search or recommend text notes you’ve written, PDFs you’ve saved, and webpages you’ve bookmarked with AI. Like Google and YouTube, but for your own content.
Seamlessly archive links that you value. Never lose track of the origin of your wisdom.
Last but not the least, build your world in a canvas with materials you’ve gathered from the Internet and show it to people.
Now you have space to make meaning out of the Internet, instead of always letting the Internet takes attention out of you.
Enter your email to join the waitlist for our closed beta. We’re actively sending out invites.
Also don’t forget to tell your friends!
On the premise of good user experience, we will choose technologies that favor individual power,
Use local-first technologies. For example, SQLite, edge AI, and P2P networking.
Use well-known and accessible formats for storing data. For example, Markdown and local files.
Investigate how to turn it into a sustainable open source product—after all, tools for thought are infrastructure software, like electricity or water for our minds, which no one should be excluded from in modern life.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush published the vision of the memex, an imaginary table-sized device that allows you to find materials, link related ideas, reflect on insights that you are interested in more efficiently.
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart showed that you could realize the vision with the computer. He showed how convenient it could be to work with information on the computer, including but not limited to viewing the structure of documents in multiple ways, drawing relational charts, and real-time remote collaboration.
The vision seems to be somehow forgotten, leaving you with file systems that can’t support any work other than storing files, siloed apps that only works in specific designed scenarios, and social media / e-commerce / content websites that exploit your attention.
It doesn’t have to be that way.